21st June 2017

The crisis in the Northern Provincial Council (NPC) and its ruling Tamil National Alliance (TNA) party, took centre stage in local politics last week. The crisis was precipitated by Chief Minister C V Wigneswaran’s decision to send two NPC Ministers on compulsory leave pending an investigation into corruption charges against them. It became a full-blown crisis to the extent that all Sinhala newspapers, which usually give only scant coverage to Northern political affairs, had the latest developments in the NPC as the lead story for several days running. Tamil newspapers based in Colombo and Jaffna also had a field day (or two) with the fast-moving story. Indeed, the crisis also gained the attention of almost all Indian newspapers as well, given the Tamil Nadu factor. While […]